Canonical vs the FSF is a matter of degree, it's not incomparable.

If the FSF didn't require copyright assignment, then most GNU stuff would still be GPL2 licensed, and that would make my life easier. Moglen says they need the copyright assignment in order to defend the copyright, but really it has mainly been used as a club to try to force people to switch to GPL3. It's about power, not about freedom.

Okay, so I read the story there about flooding in Somerset. The article itself is pretty reasonable, but many of the replies to it met the characterization of "only one cause":

"The EA was taken over by environmentalists years ago."

"The UK EA ... was created by Blair to promote the myth of CAGW."

There's no possibility that the lack of dredging is due to budget cutting or a lack of a need for dredging now that the rivers aren't used for barges any more (I don't know if they ever were), it's the AGW proponents who caused it. And there's no possibility that the floods have multiple causes, not just the lack of dredging. For example, places that used to be swamps tend to subside as the water is taken out.

Pick one.

Not at all. Blackmail is where you threaten to reveal something that the victim doesn't want to be known. The USA is quite open about the fact that it executes people.

This is more like shunning. You're doing something I don't like, so I won't deal with you.

No, it seems like an effective way to apply pressure. If you're going to use our drugs to murder people, we won't sell them to you, even if you also use them for good purposes. All you need to do is to agree not to murder people.

It's not the court's job to collect evidence. If no evidence of use was presented, then there's no evidence, and the ticket is dismissed.

So why didn't the investigating officer collect this data? It's a distracted driving ticket, not a murder investigation.

The password he used was the same as one that he had previously divulged, but the incompetent investigators at GCHQ and the police didn't think to try it.

Feels the same when you drop it on your foot.

It feels quite a bit like 96,000 tons, but quite a bit different from 96,000 grains.

Or in metric: it feels pretty much the same as 96,000 tonnes, but different from 96,000 mg.

That's the main point. The article is about Canada trying to convince companies to move, but it's pretty unlikely that Canada is the only country doing that.

The summary (and the report it quotes) is inaccurate. Car owners *can* demand that the companies destroy the data.

The only problem is, the companies will just ignore the demand.

What a fraud. Fiberoptics use glass, not plastic.

Sure, and they could charge tolls to fix the potholes in the streets, too.

In the case of the Lac Megantic accident, the cars were labelled to be less volatile than they really were. If they had been correctly labelled, maybe someone would have objected to leaving the train unmanned at the top of a hill on the main line overnight.

That's an interesting twist on it. I would have said it was budget cutters who decimated the urban forestry budget. The trees on private land were in much better shape than the ones on public land.